The legendary Joni Mitchell has been making music since the 1960s. With a sound that
incorporates elements of folk, rock, jazz, and classical, she's influenced generations
of singers and songwriters. Keep watching to discover what you might now know about her.
Mitchell was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7,
1943, in Alberta, Canada. Her parents Bill and Myrtle worked as a grocer and schoolteacher,
respectively. After World War II, the family moved to North Battleford,
Saskatchewan before settling in Saskatoon when Joni was 9 years old.
"I guess everybody knows you're from Canada."
That same year, Mitchell was hospitalized with a serious case of polio. While recovering,
she started to sing and perform for other patients, thus essentially performing the
first concerts of her life. Before her illness, she'd expressed an interest in
music but stopped piano lessons after her teacher criticized her for wanting to play her own songs.
After she got out of the hospital, she prayed for her legs to recover. She then went on to
join the church choir, which is unfortunately where she was introduced to cigarettes.
Mitchell's magnum opus 1971 album Blue includes the track "Little Green," which
is reportedly about a child that she gave up for adoption back when she was only 21. At the time,
she was an unknown folk singer, and the pregnancy resulted from a relationship
with a Calgary artist named Brad MacMath. As the song reveals, he soon abandoned Mitchell
and their unborn child for the warmer climates of California. She went on to marry a fellow
folk singer named Chuck Mitchell, although that soon fell apart as well.
Mitchell hit her big break soon after the adoption, leaving her feeling guilty for
giving up a daughter she could now support, an experience that directly inspired Blue. Mother
and daughter would eventually meet in 1997, but according to Mitchell,
it took a while for the two of them to reconcile. As she told the Toronto Star in 2013,
"She was pretty rough on me and conscripted my granddaughter,
but we've worked through all of that."
"I see it written again and again and again that I gave up my daughter to further my career.
This is so wrong. There was no career."
In 2000, Mitchell told The Globe and Mail that she sees herself as a painter first. As she put it,
"I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by
circumstance [...] I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy."
She also rejects the notion of herself as a mere Sunday painter, insisting,
"I probably spend more of my time painting than most of my friends who are full-time painters."
According to Mitchell, she takes a painterly approach to her music.
Instead of focusing on chord structure, she tries to find what she calls
"internal twisting," which comes as a result of mixing different tones at once.
Mitchell sold her visual art while she was still in high school, and many of
her album covers feature her own artwork. In addition to exhibiting her paintings,
she's released a book of drawings and watercolors paired with poetry and lyrics.
Originally titled The Christmas Book, she gave 100 copies out to friends in 1971. In 2019,
it was re-released as Morning Glory on the Vine, in celebration of Mitchell's 75th birthday.
"How did music become the career?"
"Because I got pregnant. I got pregnant. I was the only virgin in art school. Right?"
By 1969, Joni Mitchell was an established singer-songwriter. She'd scored a hit when
Judy Collins covered her song "Both Sides Now" in 1967, and she was a fixture in the
Laurel Canyon scene. Many of her peers gave celebrated performances at Woodstock, the 1969
three-day festival that's widely considered the apex of the era's counterculture movement. But as
for Mitchell herself, she was scheduled to appear on The Dick Cavett Show and thus couldn't attend.
As she prepared for the show, her boyfriend Graham Nash of the band Crosby, Stills,
Nash, & Young came into her hotel room while still high from his performance at the festival.
On The Dick Cavett Show, Mitchell was joined by Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick,
as well as Stephen Stills and David Crosby, who all talked about the festival. Mitchell took what
she heard and wrote the song "Woodstock," which tells the story of people gathering
at the festival to form a utopia free from the pains of war. So even though Mitchell wasn't
able to attend the festival, "Woodstock" would go on to become one of her most popular songs.
A year after Woodstock, Mitchell and many of her musical peers traveled to England to perform at
the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, alongside a lineup that included the likes of Jimi Hendrix
and The Who. However, the peace and love of Woodstock didn't make its way to England,
and Mitchell felt the brunt of it, as the festival was a terrible experience for her.
"Then the festival began, which was a bit of a disaster."
Mitchell was asked to move her performance from the evening to the mid-afternoon. By this time,
the crowd of 600,000 people had grown agitated by the strong security presence, the expensive
ticket prices, and the performers arriving in expensive clothing and cars. During her set,
Mitchell stopped to ask the crowd to calm down, which only increased the hostility.
While musicians who used electric instruments could overpower the rowdy audience,
Mitchell was armed with just an acoustic guitar, a dulcimer, and a piano. At one point, a man who'd
been sitting by Mitchell's piano named Yogi Joe grabbed the microphone and attempted to speak,
only to be led away by security. This only served to agitate the crowd even
more. As Mitchell later said about the festival's organizers,
"They fed me to the beast."
Joni Mitchell has released a number of critically and commercially acclaimed albums throughout the
course of her career, but one of them stands tall above the rest: 1971's Blue. In 2012,
Rolling Stone ranked it number 30 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,
and then in a revamped version in 2020, it moved all the way up to number three.
Mitchell herself has described it as, quote,
"probably the purest emotional record that I will ever make in my life."
And in 1979, she told Rolling Stone,
"There's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals. At that period of my life, I had no personal
defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely
no secrets from the world and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy."
The album became Mitchell's first to sell over a million copies, and it's been cited by such
other legendary artists as Prince, Taylor Swift, and Bob Dylan. While Mitchell would
go on to make many more successful albums, Blue remains her most iconic achievement.
In the era of free love, Mitchell connected with many of her musical partners romantically,
including two of the three members of the supergroup Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
In 1967, Mitchell began to work on her debut album
Song to a Seagull, with David Crosby as the producer. The two began a relationship,
although it soon soured. As music journalist David Browne wrote in his book Crosby, Stills,
Nash & Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup, Crosby would, quote,
"revel in presenting her to his friends, treating her like a prized, talented possession."
Also in 1967, Mitchell met poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen at the Newport Folk Festival. The
pair became friends and had a short fling, remaining close until Cohen's death in 2016.
Their relationship served as the inspiration for Mitchell's song "Rainy Night House."
Then in 1968, Mitchell began a two-year relationship with Graham Nash. The Crosby,
Stills, and Nash song "Our House," written by Nash, was inspired by their home life. Eventually,
that relationship also faded, with Mitchell breaking up with Nash by writing him a letter.
Mitchell then became involved with yet another singer-songwriter in 1971 when
she and James Taylor got together. Both of them would go on to be inspired to write songs about
their relationship, but as their musical paths diverged, so did their romantic relationship.
"You know, she made some beautiful stuff."
Like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young was born and raised in Canada before moving to the United States and
becoming part of the 60s counterculture movement. The two of them first crossed
paths in Canada in 1964, at the Fourth Dimension folk club at the University of Manitoba. Both of
them have gone on to be widely considered among the greatest singer-songwriters of all-time.
They've remained very close to each other throughout their careers,
as they've played on each other's albums and even written songs to each other.
When Young was just 19, he wrote the song "Sugar Mountain" as a lament about growing
up and becoming an adult. In response, Mitchell penned "The Circle Game," which appeared on her
1970 album Ladies of the Canyon. Unlike "Sugar Mountain," it wasn't a gloomy take about growing
old, as it instead offered a more positive perspective of growing up and developing new
dreams. The song features the character of a boy, with the last verse seeing him growing
to the age of 20. Then in 1973, Young wrote a tribute to Mitchell called "Sweet Joni." Their
paths crossed again that decade in 1976 when they performed together in The Band's farewell concert,
which was filmed for the Martin Scorsese-directed documentary The Last Waltz.
Joni Mitchell has never been afraid of playing around with genre
and incorporating different styles into her music. As Bob Dylan once told Rolling Stone,
"Joni's got a strange sense of rhythm that's all her own."
In 1975, Mitchell left behind the Laurel Canyon sound and released the album
The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Featuring jazz overtones, it leaned away from the
acoustic sound typical of her early work. Despite poor reaction from fans and critics,
she pushed forward with this trend throughout the decade. In a 1979 interview with Rolling Stone,
she detailed her evolution with experimental jazz. As she put it,
"You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your
initial success. They're going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change,
they're going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change
is interesting. So of the two options, I'd rather be crucified for changing."
On her 1979 album Mingus, Mitchell worked with notable jazz stars
Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter. The record was named in tribute to her friend,
legendary jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus,
who also collaborated with her on the album and died five months before it was released.
While some of Mitchell's contemporaries like Paul McCartney and Neil Young have
been able to continue releasing new albums into the 2020s, she has instead been forced
into early retirement. A big reason why is because she suffers from Morgellons disease,
which has limited her mobility. As she described the condition to the Los Angeles Times in 2010,
"Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm:
they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable, or mineral."
In 2013, Mitchell told the Toronto Star that she hadn't been able to do much of anything,
though non-Western medicine had helped her deal with the disease.
And as she wrote in her 2014 autobiography Joni Mitchell: In Her Own Words,
"I couldn't wear clothing. I couldn't leave my house for several years. Sometimes
it got so I'd have to crawl across the floor. My legs would cramp up,
just like a polio spasm. It hit all of the places where I had polio."
That wasn't Mitchell's only recent health struggle, as she also suffered a brain aneurysm
in 2015. She was found unconscious in her Los Angeles home and has made few public appearances
since then. Nevertheless, despite her recent struggles, her legacy remains clear. Even if
she never releases another album, the world is richer thanks to all she's already contributed.
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